"Lady Rosanne." Miss Whitcombe's smile warmed perceptibly. "The pleasure is mine. I did not expect to see you at the fair."
"I insisted," Rosanne said, with a pointed glance at her brother that suggestedinsistedwas a rather generous description of the negotiations involved. "Daniel thinks public gatherings are a form of torture specifically designed to inconvenience him, but I maintain that it is good for his character to occasionally interact with other human beings."
"Rosanne," Daniel said, in the tone he used when she was being deliberately provoking.
She ignored him entirely. "Did you see the puppet show? It waswonderful. The villain had the most magnificent moustache, he twirled it constantly, like this," she demonstrated with an imaginary moustache, and Miss Whitcombe laughed.
It was a good laugh. Warm and unaffected, without the careful modulation that characterized the laughs of London debutantes. The sound of it did that peculiar thing to Daniel's chest again.
He really did not like it.
"I missed the puppet show, I'm afraid," Miss Whitcombe said. "I was occupied with a small adventure involving kittens and a missing child."
"Oh, that wasyou?" Rosanne clapped her hands together. "I heard someone mention how marvelous! You must tell me everything. Was the child terribly frightened?"
"Not in the least. He was rather angry that I interrupted his attempts to establish a feline army."
Rosanne laughed again, and Daniel watched his sister's face transform with genuine pleasure; a transformation he saw all too rarely in London, where she moved through ballrooms like a ghost, pale and anxious and desperate to escape notice.
Here, with this woman, she wasbright.
The observation settled in his chest alongside the other uncomfortable feelings, and he did not know what to make of it.
"Miss Whitcombe was just leaving," he heard himself say.
Both women turned to look at him. Rosanne's expression was incredulous; Miss Whitcombe's was... unreadable.
"Was I?" she asked, in that same mild, polite tone that somehow conveyed a great deal more than the words themselves.
"I..." Daniel stopped. He had no idea why he had said that. It had simply emerged from his mouth, as though some part of him had decided that the best way to deal with this unsettling woman was to remove her from his presence as quickly as possible.
"Daniel, really," Rosanne said. "Miss Whitcombe has not even had a chance to try Mrs. Hendricks's apple tarts."
"I do not care for apples," Miss Whitcombe said.
She was looking at him again with that steady, disconcerting gaze, and Daniel had the sudden, absurd conviction that she waslaughingat him. Not outwardly, her expression remained perfectly composed, but somewhere beneath the surface, in a place he could sense but not see.
"Neither does Daniel," Rosanne said. "You have that in common."
"How fortunate."
The word was neutral but the delivery was not.
Daniel felt his jaw tighten. "If you will excuse me," he said, with a stiff bow that encompassed both women. "I have matters to attend to."
"Of course, Your Grace." Miss Whitcombe curtsied again, and this time there was definitely something in her eyes; something that made him feel as though he had been weighed and measured and found... What? Wanting? Amusing? He could not tell.
He did not stay to find out.
***
Lillian watched the Duke of Wyntham retreat across the village green, his dark coat cutting a severe line through the cheerful chaos of the fair, and allowed herself a small, private smile.
Your hem is dirty.
In her twenty-three years of existence, Lillian had received a great many conversational remarks from gentlemen of various ranks and temperaments. She had been complimented on her eyes; adequate, her singing voice; terrible, and her dancing; passable, though only when she concentrated very hard on not stepping on anyone's feet. She had been lectured on the weather, the state of the roads, and the lamentable decline of proper feminine accomplishment in the modern age.
But she had never, in all her years, been informed that her hem was dirty by a man who looked as though the observation caused him physical pain.
